L.A. Affairs: I could no longer play it cool. I was madly in love with my roommate
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We met on Facebook Marketplace. After a brief FaceTime call, we were locked in.
The night she moved in was a disaster. She arrived an hour early, so I was surprised to see her in the driveway. She’s beautiful, I thought. Whoops.
“I’m Jack,” I choked out nervously to my new roommate, Kaitlyn.
I went on Match to meet my match. But the dates I went on left a lot to be desired. A week before my Match cancellation was final, I read one (last) email out of curiosity.
After some pleasantries, I explained that I couldn’t help with her moving boxes because I was about to conduct a highly sensitive business transaction.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 1,000.” The buyer, a heavy-set Mafia type, repeated this over and over as cash spilled over the table. Kaitlyn and her mother lapped around us with boxes, increasingly uncomfortable by the spectacle.
I was selling a car that I had arbitraged to rent out on Turo, which turned out to be a poor investment. I found a buyer (also on Facebook) who insisted on paying in cash.
Kaitlyn’s mother opened the fridge.
“Don’t worry,” I hollered. “I’ll make room in a sec.” From back to front, each shelf, side shelf and drawer was filled with beer. I threw a huge going-away party for my old roommate but didn’t anticipate how small the turnout would be.
I glanced over to find the mother staring into the abyss of the fridge, experiencing some premonition of what grim fate was about to befall her daughter.
“All right, that’s 35,000.” We shook hands, and the buyer strutted out. I turned around to find Kaitlyn and her mother staring fearfully at the mound of cash. Reading the tension in the room, I told them: “Don’t worry. I’ll get out of your hair soon. I have a blind date with a girl at a vegan spot in WeHo.”
Before fire destroyed Pacific Palisades, we were a family — my husband, my daughter and me. Would we still be one after the smoke cleared?
Kaitlyn and her mother turned to each other, shocked. I later learned that this was the moment they learned that I wasn’t gay. (Apparently the hoop earring in my Facebook profile pic gave them the wrong idea.)
My roommate stood shifting in the corner uncomfortably, waiting for her mother to say something like: “Pack your stuff. We’re getting the f— out of here.”
After a moment, the mother looked at me and asked, “What are you going to do with the cash?” I hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Deposit it?” I said.
“You can’t deposit more than $10,000 in a two-week period. To be safe, do no more than $3,000 per day,” she explained.
Phew. By some miracle, they didn’t go running for the hills. Kaitlyn’s mother was an immigrant from Vietnam — scrappy and apparently well-versed in the subtleties of the IRS’ cash deposit policy. She was surprisingly impressed by my Turo scheme.
Later that night, my new roommate and I sat on the couch and chatted. She told me that she had initially planned to move to L.A. because of a boyfriend. When the relationship ended, she figured that she could still use the change of scenery. I, in turn, explained to her that I had never been in a serious relationship or in love before. We learned that we had a lot in common: We were both Canadian and had an unapologetic infatuation with Cheez-Its; we had similar views on faith and morality.
It’s time to let it go and move on to my next adventure. But I know that my husband’s spirit will always be with me.
By that point, the pile of cash had migrated to the coffee table. All consolidated, it stood around 10 inches. “Wanna hold it?” I asked.
“Kind of,” she said. Taking turns holding the cash, I showed her a YouTube montage of Nick Kroll and John Mulaney’s “Oh, Hello” sketches. We spent a lot of time laughing that night.
A couple of weeks later, we decided to foster two puppies, which we named Hallie and Annie after “The Parent Trap” twins. We coordinated to make sure they were well taken care of, while also carving out our own quality time like the occasional movie night.
“You’re married!” my work friend told me after I explained my living situation. Hearing him say that sparked a realization within me. Are we married? I pondered.
The tides of love lurched forward in the form of a press release: Cheez-It pop-up in Joshua Tree. We were on the same page. With only one day to spare before it closed, we packed our bags and hit the road for the desert.
We arrived at the Airbnb late, but we made time to sit in the hammock outside and watch the stars for a while. There was only one bed, so we agreed to create a pillow wall. When I woke up the next morning, she was on the couch.
The Cheez-It experience was marvelous. We bought matching T-shirts and stocked up on loads of snacks and paraphernalia. There was a massive effigy of a Cheez-It cowboy outside.
A couple asked us to take a photo of them standing between the cowboy’s legs and we obliged. “Want us to get one of y’all?” the woman asked. “Yeah!” We posed under the statue. “Cheeeez-Itsss,” we said smiling.
We spent a perfect weekend in L.A. and another good one in Orange County. So what happened? Why did he ghost me? ‘I really like this woman in San Diego,’ he said.
“Now kiss!” the woman said. We exchanged mortified glances.
“Oh, no. It’s not like that. We’re just friends,” Kaitlyn said.
“Yeah, gross, I would never!” I retorted. On the way home, a silent contemplation possessed the car. Eventually, my roommate turned and asked: “You don’t actually think it’d be that horrible to date me, right?”
I had oversold my feigned disgust. “What? No. Of course not.”
A few more seconds of silence followed before I could no longer resist my pick-me compulsions. “And you don’t think it’d be so horrible to date me, right?”
“No,” she said with a slight smirk.
I spent a lot of that summer at my family’s home on the East Coast, and she came to visit me. I showed her around Boston and Cape Cod. Tension was brewing between us, but I was terrified to address it and desecrate our sacred platonic bond as roommates.
Arm brushing and other forms of subtle flirting eventually reached a pitch too high to ignore, but I ignored it anyway. She was becoming frustrated by my lack of intentionality and said that she would prefer to go home before my entire family arrived the next day.
Beyond the standard roommate boundaries, I think I was just afraid that she wouldn’t feel the same way I did. I was terrified of being rejected, especially when I had her captive so far away from home.
Realizing that I was too chicken, Kaitlyn took the reins and admitted her feelings. I clumsily followed suit and afterward experienced a level of joy that I never had before. I was in love.
The next day, she met my parents, nine siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. At that point, we weren’t official, so we, as implausible at it seemed, continued the trip under the guise of friendship. None of my family bought it, and they unabashedly referred to her as my girlfriend the entire time.
She got along with them famously, which made me feel so much closer to her and my family. We were ramping up to something.
At the end of the week, Kaitlyn went back to Los Angeles to pack her things and officially move out so we could explore something bigger. We’ve now been together and in love for almost two years and going strong.
The author is a screenwriter based in Los Angeles. He is the oldest of 10 and is a dengue fever survivor. He’s on Instagram: @jackmstar
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email [email protected]. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
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